"This is and is not Cressid": Seeing Double in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida

Abstract

Abstract: This article offers a new interpretation of Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida in the context of "that terrible Poetomachia " at the turn of the seventeenth century. It argues that Shakespeare stages a microcosm of the poets' war between the recently revived children's companies and the professional theater. Shakespeare appropriates conventions from the boy company repertories to defend against their caricatures of professional playing and its system of apprenticeship. Reading the play as a whole, and the character of Cressida in particular, as perspectival double images, it shows how Shakespeare uses the indeterminate body of the boy actor playing Cressida to create a visual analogy between the two and to foreground their shared dramatic situations. Through the figure of Cressida, Shakespeare metatheatrically dramatizes the vulnerability and exploitation of Elizabethan boy actors caught between warring theaters, and in doing so weaves the War of the Theaters into the Trojan War to reflect on his own contemporary theatrical market.